As of this application, there are over 700 million digital publications being published every day. Digital publications come in various forms and can be images, text, video, links, or other digitally publishable material. Digital publication data providers include a plurality of sources such as social networking services, publication aggregation services, news services, weblogs, Closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera feeds etc. Often these digital publications are associated with a geographic location or geographic region. Some geographic associations with publications are performed manually by users, while other geographic associations are performed by data providers or a user's client device, depending on context. For example, a user may manually “check-in”, comment upon, photograph or capture video from a geographic location or region, while the data provider and/or a user's client device may automatically associate a geographic location or region identifier with a user's publication. Data providers collect and distribute vast amounts of publications having geographic associations.
Today, digital publications exert tremendous influence over the way people around the world, of all ages, obtain and share information. In North America alone, more than 60 percent of Internet-connected individuals participate in publishing text, images and video on a daily basis. Publication data providers such as Facebook™, Twitter™, Foursquare™ Panoramio™, Instagram™, Goolge+™, Sina Weibo™, Flickr™, Picasa™, and other social networking services, publication aggregation services, news services, and weblogs are drawing millions of people each day who want to read messages from friends, and share and post text, images, and videos.
The rise of digital publications have coincided with the advancement of mobile technology. Smartphones, which combine the functionality of a telephone, camera, and personal computer into a single, portable device, have enabled people to share text, images, or videos from almost anywhere, with anyone, at any time. The mobility and portability of such devices have caused publication data providers to adopt and support the association (e.g., tagging) of publications with geo-location information. It is now possible to identify publications from within a particular geographic region (i.e., geo-region) or within a threshold proximity (e.g., radius) to a particular geographic location (i.e., geo-location) based on the geo-location information that is associated with the various forms of publications.